Aaaargh, i'm having a flashback...

You missed a few emoticons.

I was thinking the exact thing. Isn't that the movie where Katherine Helman's face gets stretched? That was awesome!

Ghost Town It was pretty good. Obviously the story has been done a million times but I like the spin of the husband not sending love-y dove-y messages back to his wife. And I like Greg Kinnear.

Or something stronger (which should not be read as an admission of anything ). I haven't been able to watch it again since I saw it in the theater. No way will it hold up to the memory.

The Happening: Wow....This was just so many different kinds of awful I don't know where to begin. It was also a bit like a trainwreck, I just couldn't look away. I kept thinking it would get better, but then the guy turned on the tracker and laid down in front of it.........wow.....

Saw Man on Wire last night.

From imdb:



Really well made documentary with some sensible dramatizations and quite a bit of suspense built for a story where we essentially know the outcome.

And its on this year's Oscar list for best Documentary Feature!

Kinamand, a Danish film about a plumber who makes a "green card" marriage with a Chinese woman. A sweet, straightforward tale.

The Lovers of the Arctic Circle, a wildly romantic Spanish film that left me both gnashing my teeth and genuinely touched.

Slap Shot, an old Paul Newman film that I'd nearly forgotten about until reading his obits. I'd seen it when it first came out, and all I remembered about it was the fights, the Hansons, and the striptease. It's still funny. Odd to realize that Michael Ontkean's wife was played by a young Lindsey Crouse, before her Mamet years. Don't know what became of Ontkean (I had the hugest crush on him when he was in a show called The Rookies when I was a kid), but I'm glad his striptease still survives - it's a classic.

no, i'm sorry, but you're wrong: it's crap.

I hate it when people mince words.

No, you're wrong. it's good!

The Panic in Needle Park--Al Pacino's first movie, about heroin addiction. Very gritty, and reminiscent in feel of French Connection, which was made around the same time. It's still very hard to believe that the West 70s and 80s were crime- and drug-ridden once.

a pattern develops: bicyclists have no taste in movies as well as in clothes.

Days of Heaven.
watch it and be prepared to be mesmerized as the landscape of 1900 america opens up on your flat panel - original photographs morphing into one gorgeous scene after another, like paintings in a museum. the film won an oscar for the photography. a visual treat.
watching the film is closer to reading a good book. spare dialog, narrated mostly be the voice of a young girl. you really engage with the film to get to the characters.

That was my impressionof it when it came out (Late 70s?, very early 80s?). And wasn't it pretty much our introduction to Richard Gere?

My introduction to Richard Gere was American Gigolo.

could be. he looks very young and, well, beautiful. and he stands out because the faces of all the other characters are right out of those 1900 photos - imperfect features, wrinkled, ravaged, scarred. except sam shepard who also is a knock out.
came out in 1978.

4.

I'm having trouble getting past the first 15 minutes.

As a director, Malick does good work, but very slowly (6 films in 40 years). If you liked Days of Heaven, you might also enjoy his earlier Badlands.

Badlands is better, no?

The Thin Red Line is also great and so much fucking better than the same year's Saving Private Ryan it's embarrassing.

The New World is, however, inexplicably awful unless you believe that Colin Farrell's lack of talent is contagious.

The 400 Blows. (1958) Francois Truffaut's first film based on his experiences when barely a teenager in Paris. Poignant and unexpectedly funny at times. An interesting look (from today's perspective) at the French juvenile criminal system.

A Wedding. (1978) Robert Altman. Thumbs up. A mordant look at a wedding. Holds up well and I found it quite enjoyable.

Burn after Reading. (2008) Joel & Ethan Coen. Critics were not too kind with this movie, but I liked it a lot. The District of Columbia and its people with Clooney, Swinton, Pitt, Malkovich, McDormand and Richard Jenkins playing some oddball characters dealing in deception, cluelessness and obsessiveness as CIA dwellers, lawyers, gym people, government employees, internet daters, plastic surgery lovers and process servers. J.K. Simmons nearly steals the movie as the nonchalant but increasingly bewildered C.I.A. boss.

Yes, it is.

so i watched Badlands which was taken before Days of Heaven (1973) i felt as though i was watching the same film but for a stronger storyline. same techniques in both - still-life like photography, narrated in the voice of a young girl, gorgeous male lead, scenes of physical labor, and the director's love of old photographs. martin sheen is great and the ending scenes in particular were very well scripted and directed.
next is The Thin Red Line, taken 20 YEARS after DoH!

When I left the the theater after it was over, I was about nineteen, and I couldn't talk for an hour.

(My friends were stunned. Tana, not speak? Then they f'ing started mocking it. I still think they're dingdongs.)

The grasshopper scene was filmed like this: they threw baskets of dried beans (this thread devoid of endorsements for that stuff, please) onto the actors, and then they showed it in reverse, in slow motion.

My first sighting of Richard Gere, and also of Sam Shepard, who, for me, was hunkier.

Then, Gere killed me yet again in "An Officer and a Gentleman" (gosh, it's held up well), and "Breathless."

What a film. The "girl," Linda Manz, with her thick Yankee accent, remains 4'10". She was 17 at the time of the filming.

Music by Ennio Morricone. Booweeooooweeeeeooooooo.

I should see it again, now that I'm not 19.
Nice link.

The Thin Red Line - huge disappointment. star studded but quite wasted. i fast forwarded the entire movie and the same thing was going on. bleh.

The Wackness. very interesting.

Death at a Funeral. The dvd cover had such enthusiastic reviews on it. "I nearly died laughing!" and "A beautifully intricate farse," I thought it would be worth a try. It was just painful. The minutes flew by like hours. It would be more fun to lie down on a bed of fire ants.

Sorry you didn't like it. I thought it wonderful.

sorry! nothing personal :-)
it was way too depressing and i usually *like* war movies.
and I also liked The New World but mostly i watched colin firth and did not know anything about malik at the time.

The Counterfeiters. German Holocaust movie about a group of talented Jews tasked with forging the British pound and the U.S. dollar in an effort by the Germans to create havoc with those economies. Although normally I am squeamish about Holocaust movies, and there certainly was reason to be on this one, I found it to be a heartwarming story of loyalty and humanity. The lead guy Karl Markovics, has one of those faces made for this type of character. Gaunt and hard and ugly.

a row boat.

The first season of 30 Rock. I had only seen one bit of one show once and decided to wait to see them all together on DVD. Well worth the wait.

We're completely hooked on MI5, aka Spooks. Hard to limit ourselves to one episode per evening. Can't get the DVDs here from Netflix fast enough.

King Corn, a surprisingly sweet (no pun intended) and thoughtful documentary about our current monoculture. Too many of these things come off shrill and preachy. This one is well balanced. The writing and directing are a little awkward and amateurish at times but in a way that adds to the odd charm.

chad

Darjeeling Limited

Gawd I hate French singers.

Nice Kinks & Stones tracks tho.

wong kar wai's chunking express. has an intro and and an epilogue by quentin tarantino, apparently a fan of kar wai. i can see the effect of this in pulp fiction, particularly the first half. liked it a lot.

"Le Caire: nid d'espions": a French James Bond spoof. Hysterically funny if you are in the right mood.

Started box set of series 3 of the wire.

I concur about OSS 117 - Le Caire - saw it last summer at the local film series.
I've just about finished the first season of The Wire. On to season 2 next [which, I've heard, is the weakest of the seasons, but it's probably still better than most current dramas on the tv today.]

Tropic Thunder. Tom Cruise's cameo as a studio exec was great. His best work seems to be when he plays people who cuss, like this and his role in Magnolia. Other than TC, my favorite part was the mock previews at the beginning. Jack Black spoofing Eddie Murphy was a priceless idea.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay Simultaneously the crudest and funniest of the genre, though not quite as good as the original.

The Squid and the Whale (2005). About the disintegration of a marriage of two hyper-educated parents of two boys in 1986 Brooklyn. With Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney. I liked it quite a bit. R. now wants me to show her Brooklyn. The movie shows a lot of the Park Slope area as it was supposed to be 20 years ago.

Tampopo. Enjoyed much of it. Other parts I'm not sure what to make of. Japanese take on French New Wave? Just plain weirdness for the sake of weirdness? Netflix lists it but also says that it is unavailable, so I bought it for $14 on Amazon. Plenty of opportunity to watch it again. But if I start deconstructing it, comparing it to Diva and/or The Magnificent Seven, please stop me.

Chad

This is England, a skinhead coming of age movie. Quite enjoyable but I can't say I really saw much point in it. Some skinheads are nice guys? OK. Some skinheads are deeply troubled? OK. Some skinheads are racists whereas others aren't? OK.

A depiction of growing up fatherless in England. Father was killed in some war. Unintended social consequences of letting your citizens die abroad fighting a war. What war can do to your children if you die. Shit happens.

Yvonne commented that the film never made a particularly strong connection between the fictional events and the documentary footage of Thatcher's Wars of Terror. Even though the father died in one of those, he might just as well have been run over by a bus*.

*Except for one speech.

Wasn't the main character object of ridicule because his father was one of the few that died in that particular war?

I didn't think so. In the initial scene he's ridiculed for being short, orphaned (just in general) and too poor to afford trendy trousers.

The Au Pair Girls is going to show up in this thread very soon.